How is it that Ask Slashdot ends up being so damn relevant so often? Just two weeks ago, I decided to get back into math.
Anyway, I can't speak for someone who tackled Calculus, but I picked up a book called "Forgotten Algebra", which starts off really light, and ends up somewhere between where my grade 11 and 12 years left off. I take a commuter train to work and back, which gives me an hour and a half of math joy, and I manage to plug in a couple hours on the weekend.
So far, it's been a very rewarding break from all those programming books I've been cramming into my head. I plan on taking on some trig next.
I'm a self taught geek, and my strongest means of learning has always been books. I thought math might be an exception, and it may be at a higher level, but so far it's worked out excellently for myself. I can't wait to go in to work tomorrow and do more.
I'm not sure how HMV decides the cost of albums. I just bought a new release yesterday (Jerry Cantrell, Degradation Trip) for $17. I could spend $25 on some single-platter CDs.
I was wondering about the costs of goods which are arbitrarily priced: a lot of prices are given because they sound good, ie: $647 over $650 or $17.99 over $20.00. Because of the exchange rate, are we getting a better deal on CDs than the Americans in some cases, just to hit the selling pricepoints?
Re:My one big issue with the film (SPOILER?)
on
Minority Report
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· Score: 2
Society was okay with it before. Was it somehow publicized after the cogs were shown to be fallible in cases where people have the knowledge to change the future?
Re:My one big issue with the film (SPOILER?)
on
Minority Report
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· Score: 2
** BIG SPOILER **
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Dismantling the whole fuckin thing at the end is a terrible idea. Why not just have a call center that tries to talk these people out of it? 90% of all the people would be horrified. Failing that, talk to the victims. Tell them not to go home, etc.
I use my software tv out for playing divx still. The drivers were shitty. (win2k fresh install) The only thing that they would have given me is the ability to fast forward and rewind with the remote control on my celeron 900.
It comes with it's own horribly skinned app, which crashes consistently on my computer.
It's still good for watching dvds. You could , in theory, throw this card into a machine that has no sound or tv out, and watch movies on your tv with it, since it provides high quality outs for both.
Note that the tv out only works for watching movies-- it's not an addon tv out card that'll let you use emulators and the like on your tv. For one of those, either get a scanline converter or tv out on your video card. I use a tnt2.
The weight on the chair must be within a ten pound range of the last time someone logged in with that ID. Thus, the majority of local cracks during office hours are reduced to people in your weight class. Sure you could put a book on your lap, but the point is removing inconspicuity.
I did some searches, and I ended up with different results than google. Perhaps of note, the results I got with alltheweb are from 1998, whereas google's are from this year.
I'm very intrigued if they are going to count bandwidth between people on the same subnet, or to the usenet servers. Afaik, they don't incur the same transmission costs on those transfers.
I bet they do. I will give them pure hell, if they try to charge me or give me shit for this.
Here's an interesting one. What if one of the developers nailed a cheater, or the creator of a cheat who distributed it across the net for clearly malicious purposes with a DMCA violation?
A lot of a web programmer's job is just repetitive stuff. I should probably have said "I can produce a thousand lines of code a day". This means either I type at full speed, I write a code generator, I subclass an object that I wrote beforehand (things are going this way as soon as my managers realise that doing work upfront saves them money) or I paste.
As for the code that isn't regurgitated, I tend to write it slower. But, my job isn't that tough. If you wanted me to bang out graphics algorithms in C++, I would be slowed down significantly, as I'm less familiar with the territory. Essentially, it's about the number of decisions made per minute. I don't claim to have a brain capable of making more than what I percieve to be the average.
Proprietary software goes at the tariff of US$ 50-200 per line of debugged code.
I can hammer out about a thousand lines of code in an average productive coding day at my job. My employer pays about $55 an hour to keep my ass in the seat when all taxes and environmental (office, air conditioning, etc) is paid for. I know they make about $40 an hour on my work.
So then, if the client pays $760 to keep my ass in place a day, they are $49,240 short using your lowest estimate. Jeez.
I should also mention that those costs are canadian.
I use the Kinesis Professional model with 3-action footswitch in dvorak. (Yes, no one can type on my board but me.) I don't have any sort of wrist problems, but it certainly does make for faster typing when I'm feeling lazy, as I don't ever take my hands off home row. Ctrl and alt are done with my feet, and I relearned to use the proper shift key (the one on the opposite side of the keyboard from the key being depressed). To top it off, I'm a diehard emacs user. It works.
Two Thrustmaster USB gamepads for snes/nes/genesis emulation: $70
SB Live 5.1 value: $45
Sony Wega 27" TV (no hdtv): $900
Time spent putting it together and tweaking the hardware: 20 or so hours.
Am I happy/satisfied? Fuck yeah.
Re:Okay, if I had a chance to interview Carmack
on
E3 Doom III Preview
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· Score: 2
It does add a considerable amount of complexity to have to describe certain things in two languages.
It makes more sense to do the majority of the server side-only (non bg_* code) in an inline scripting language.
Quake 3 almost used compiled dlls on the client side before Carmack wrote the qvm code, for efficiency. While it's the same language, the interpreted (bit versus byte) code would have been different.
Note that there are approx 6000 lines of code in the bg_* files, and approx 32,000 lines of g_* (server specific stuff)... at least in the Threewave source tree. Hardly worth weighting your development decisions on the 6000 lines.
Okay, if I had a chance to interview Carmack
on
E3 Doom III Preview
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Here is what I'd ask. (Yes, I know he will probably read this, and yes, this is pre-meditated in the chance of an opportunity arising.)
You've expressed your opinions on using Java as the language to
replace DLLs in the past. Two of the reasons you gave for not using
Java were the bleeding edge nature of the APIs which added more chaos
to the already chaotic Quake stew than you were willing to give, and
the speed of execution. Although it isn't as efficient as straight C
code, what are your impressions with Perl since you learnt it a while
back? Would you consider writing the client and server game logic
modules in a multiplayer oriented game in a different language from
each other?
Early during the development of Quake 2, Brian Hook said in an
interview once saying that you said that you would most likely be a
leader in the real time gaming graphics field until around 2004. If
this is an accurate recollection of something you said at that time,
what did you foresee happening that might raise the question of your
respectable dominance in the realtime gaming graphics field?
Doom is going to be using hardcoded DLLs again, since the move to C++
negated your ability to use LCC retargeted to bytecode. This has,
most likely caused you to see the significance of standardizing the
bytecode instead of the language. Are there any plans in the future
for retargeting compilers of other languages for the purpose of
security and cross platformism wins with using virtual machines? If
so, will they use the same bytecode as Quake 3 did?
You have expressed enthusiasm many times for the NeXT STeP environment
and how you might still be developing under it if there was support
for target hardware. Have you looked at the functionality of GNUStep,
which is a project attempting to close the functionality of NeXTSTeP?
In every Id product, the bugs that have crept up are rarely related to
the renderer and therefore rarely likely to be code you wrote. Do you
feel that you produce few uncaught or unreproducible bugs in general
compared to most developers, or is it because the renderer is so
throughly tested in the development of idgames due to it's fundamental
placement in the games architectures?
I bought my gamecube for one main reason-- party games. well, countless hours of playing Super Smash Brothers, Super Monkey Ball, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, Sega Soccer Slam and "that cross-platform Bond game" have gone by, and I'm ready for the next round.
Most people's opinions of consoles after a purchase depend almost completely on what games they bought. Most people with a gamecube purchased Star Wars: Rogue Leader and maybe Waverace or something to that effect, perhaps with no extra controllers.
To me, buying a good game library is like designing a game (but with far fewer decisions): you need to have a cohesive strategy, or else you risk having a boring console. For me, it was multiplayer gaming. Satisfied, I am.
If anyone thinks that Nintendo's laid it's cards out on the table, I think they're gonna be surprised. The future shows a lot of interesting things: Mario Party 4, a new Mario Kart, a new Zelda game, a new Starfox game in the vein of Zelda64, something from Squaresoft in the way of Final Fantasy, Super Mario Sunshine, Bomberman (this month), more Resident Evil games from Capcom, Mario Golf/Tennis and of course, Metroid Prime, which is being developed by a friend of mine who is nothing more than completely convinced that it's going to be the game of the year.
It's good that you're able to make a list of reasons to have tables and all, but I have to say that most of the time that people use tables in a word processor document, they would have been better using a spreadsheet.
I think it was on slashdot's last story that someone posted a URL to this site. Well, I convinced my employer to buy me a macro footpedal and one of the professional qwerty/dvorak keyboards (I already am a dvorak typist).
It's been an interesting switch, and I most certainly find some advantage in the footpedal. My hands leave home row significantly less than the average typist. I believe this could make me a faster typist overall given some more time.
Uh, the guy said Golden Sun. It's turn based combat. I'm pretty sure my cable modem could stand up to the bandwidth needed to play those sorts of games.
Note: All prices in this message are Canadian dollars.
The price of games has gone up quite sharply in the last while. The first one I noticed was Return to Castle Wolfenstein which sold for around $80 here. That is a shitload of money.
Now, if you go into Electronics Boutique (who do mark their games up more than anyone else in town), you can find games for consoles for as much as $85, as the norm. That's fucking steep. I remember paying $55 or $60 for a game in most cases. After taxes, the game comes to just below a hundred dollars.
The gameboy advance games are being sold for more than the original gameboy games back in the day. I used to purchase original gameboy games in '91 for $35. Now they are $65. Hell, even the original gameboy games have a jump in price.
Copyright only protects the implementation of an idea, not the idea itself. If someone comes up with the idea completely separate from you, then it isn't protected. This is why patents exist; they protect ideas, not the implementations of them.
I recommend a lot of you go to your library and get a book on intellectual property law, and read it from cover to cover. God knows you (yes, you!) speculate about it enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, I can't speak for someone who tackled Calculus, but I picked up a book called "Forgotten Algebra", which starts off really light, and ends up somewhere between where my grade 11 and 12 years left off. I take a commuter train to work and back, which gives me an hour and a half of math joy, and I manage to plug in a couple hours on the weekend.
So far, it's been a very rewarding break from all those programming books I've been cramming into my head. I plan on taking on some trig next.
I'm a self taught geek, and my strongest means of learning has always been books. I thought math might be an exception, and it may be at a higher level, but so far it's worked out excellently for myself. I can't wait to go in to work tomorrow and do more.
I was wondering about the costs of goods which are arbitrarily priced: a lot of prices are given because they sound good, ie: $647 over $650 or $17.99 over $20.00. Because of the exchange rate, are we getting a better deal on CDs than the Americans in some cases, just to hit the selling pricepoints?
Society was okay with it before. Was it somehow publicized after the cogs were shown to be fallible in cases where people have the knowledge to change the future?
-
-
-
-
Dismantling the whole fuckin thing at the end is a terrible idea. Why not just have a call center that tries to talk these people out of it? 90% of all the people would be horrified. Failing that, talk to the victims. Tell them not to go home, etc.
I preordered one of these.
I use my software tv out for playing divx still. The drivers were shitty. (win2k fresh install) The only thing that they would have given me is the ability to fast forward and rewind with the remote control on my celeron 900.
It comes with it's own horribly skinned app, which crashes consistently on my computer.
It's still good for watching dvds. You could , in theory, throw this card into a machine that has no sound or tv out, and watch movies on your tv with it, since it provides high quality outs for both.
Note that the tv out only works for watching movies-- it's not an addon tv out card that'll let you use emulators and the like on your tv. For one of those, either get a scanline converter or tv out on your video card. I use a tnt2.
The weight on the chair must be within a ten pound range of the last time someone logged in with that ID. Thus, the majority of local cracks during office hours are reduced to people in your weight class. Sure you could put a book on your lap, but the point is removing inconspicuity.
That a rock in space detected as an asteroid is part of a bigger cluster?
I did some searches, and I ended up with different results than google. Perhaps of note, the results I got with alltheweb are from 1998, whereas google's are from this year.
I bet they do. I will give them pure hell, if they try to charge me or give me shit for this.
Here's an interesting one. What if one of the developers nailed a cheater, or the creator of a cheat who distributed it across the net for clearly malicious purposes with a DMCA violation?
As for the code that isn't regurgitated, I tend to write it slower. But, my job isn't that tough. If you wanted me to bang out graphics algorithms in C++, I would be slowed down significantly, as I'm less familiar with the territory. Essentially, it's about the number of decisions made per minute. I don't claim to have a brain capable of making more than what I percieve to be the average.
I can hammer out about a thousand lines of code in an average productive coding day at my job. My employer pays about $55 an hour to keep my ass in the seat when all taxes and environmental (office, air conditioning, etc) is paid for. I know they make about $40 an hour on my work.
So then, if the client pays $760 to keep my ass in place a day, they are $49,240 short using your lowest estimate. Jeez.
I should also mention that those costs are canadian.
I use the Kinesis Professional model with 3-action footswitch in dvorak. (Yes, no one can type on my board but me.) I don't have any sort of wrist problems, but it certainly does make for faster typing when I'm feeling lazy, as I don't ever take my hands off home row. Ctrl and alt are done with my feet, and I relearned to use the proper shift key (the one on the opposite side of the keyboard from the key being depressed). To top it off, I'm a diehard emacs user. It works.
I also didn't list a monitor because I had a spare 19". Or maybe I pirated that as well.
I'm running under win2k. Sorry.
Time spent putting it together and tweaking the hardware: 20 or so hours.
Am I happy/satisfied? Fuck yeah.
It makes more sense to do the majority of the server side-only (non bg_* code) in an inline scripting language.
Quake 3 almost used compiled dlls on the client side before Carmack wrote the qvm code, for efficiency. While it's the same language, the interpreted (bit versus byte) code would have been different.
Note that there are approx 6000 lines of code in the bg_* files, and approx 32,000 lines of g_* (server specific stuff)... at least in the Threewave source tree. Hardly worth weighting your development decisions on the 6000 lines.
You've expressed your opinions on using Java as the language to replace DLLs in the past. Two of the reasons you gave for not using Java were the bleeding edge nature of the APIs which added more chaos to the already chaotic Quake stew than you were willing to give, and the speed of execution. Although it isn't as efficient as straight C code, what are your impressions with Perl since you learnt it a while back? Would you consider writing the client and server game logic modules in a multiplayer oriented game in a different language from each other?
Early during the development of Quake 2, Brian Hook said in an interview once saying that you said that you would most likely be a leader in the real time gaming graphics field until around 2004. If this is an accurate recollection of something you said at that time, what did you foresee happening that might raise the question of your respectable dominance in the realtime gaming graphics field?
Doom is going to be using hardcoded DLLs again, since the move to C++ negated your ability to use LCC retargeted to bytecode. This has, most likely caused you to see the significance of standardizing the bytecode instead of the language. Are there any plans in the future for retargeting compilers of other languages for the purpose of security and cross platformism wins with using virtual machines? If so, will they use the same bytecode as Quake 3 did?
You have expressed enthusiasm many times for the NeXT STeP environment and how you might still be developing under it if there was support for target hardware. Have you looked at the functionality of GNUStep, which is a project attempting to close the functionality of NeXTSTeP?
In every Id product, the bugs that have crept up are rarely related to the renderer and therefore rarely likely to be code you wrote. Do you feel that you produce few uncaught or unreproducible bugs in general compared to most developers, or is it because the renderer is so throughly tested in the development of idgames due to it's fundamental placement in the games architectures?
Most people's opinions of consoles after a purchase depend almost completely on what games they bought. Most people with a gamecube purchased Star Wars: Rogue Leader and maybe Waverace or something to that effect, perhaps with no extra controllers.
To me, buying a good game library is like designing a game (but with far fewer decisions): you need to have a cohesive strategy, or else you risk having a boring console. For me, it was multiplayer gaming. Satisfied, I am.
If anyone thinks that Nintendo's laid it's cards out on the table, I think they're gonna be surprised. The future shows a lot of interesting things: Mario Party 4, a new Mario Kart, a new Zelda game, a new Starfox game in the vein of Zelda64, something from Squaresoft in the way of Final Fantasy, Super Mario Sunshine, Bomberman (this month), more Resident Evil games from Capcom, Mario Golf/Tennis and of course, Metroid Prime, which is being developed by a friend of mine who is nothing more than completely convinced that it's going to be the game of the year.
It's good that you're able to make a list of reasons to have tables and all, but I have to say that most of the time that people use tables in a word processor document, they would have been better using a spreadsheet.
It's been an interesting switch, and I most certainly find some advantage in the footpedal. My hands leave home row significantly less than the average typist. I believe this could make me a faster typist overall given some more time.
I also jump in Quake with my big toe now.
Uh, the guy said Golden Sun. It's turn based combat. I'm pretty sure my cable modem could stand up to the bandwidth needed to play those sorts of games.
The price of games has gone up quite sharply in the last while. The first one I noticed was Return to Castle Wolfenstein which sold for around $80 here. That is a shitload of money.
Now, if you go into Electronics Boutique (who do mark their games up more than anyone else in town), you can find games for consoles for as much as $85, as the norm. That's fucking steep. I remember paying $55 or $60 for a game in most cases. After taxes, the game comes to just below a hundred dollars.
The gameboy advance games are being sold for more than the original gameboy games back in the day. I used to purchase original gameboy games in '91 for $35. Now they are $65. Hell, even the original gameboy games have a jump in price.
It's just ugly.
I recommend a lot of you go to your library and get a book on intellectual property law, and read it from cover to cover. God knows you (yes, you!) speculate about it enough.
Gender repression denial is a hugely untapped market.